Hip-Rock Is Back: After a Couple of Years Away From the Scene, Drop Mob Looks to Grow and Evolve

When I talked to the members of Drop Mob about 2 1/2 years ago, they were working on a new album and playing shows regularly.

Then … it seemed as if the locally renowned rap-metal band dropped out of the scene. But in June, the band posted a video on Facebook showing a practice—and announcing Drop Mob’s return.

I recently dropped in during one of Drop Mob’s rehearsals at guitarist David Burk’s home in Indio. Burk explained why Drop Mob had been inactive.

“You need to take a break sometimes,” Burk said. “I needed to take care of some personal stuff. But I kept in touch with everybody. I never let anybody not know my intentions, but I knew I had to step away and get some personal things back in order.”

Vocalist Gabe Perez said that he and bassist Steve Zepeda came back hungry, but there was one issue the band needed to resolve.

“Dave called me up one day and said, ‘Hey, let’s play. Oh, we need a drummer, though,’” Perez said.

Perez reached out to former Remnants of Man drummer Alex Milward, who had also been absent from the local-music scene.

“I dropped Alex a message and was like, ‘Hey, man, you playing again? Want to come jam with us? If you like it, that’s cool. If you don’t like it, that’s cool. We’ll see what happens,’” Perez said. “He came and jammed with us twice and said, ‘I’m in.’”

Milward said he was hesitant to respond to Perez’s offer at first.

“After Remnants split up, my drum kit went into storage, and it stayed there,” Milward said. “I had just pulled it out and got it set up to start working on my chops again. But I told Gabe, ‘Have Dave send me three tracks … and just his guitar parts.’ Four weeks later, we have five songs that we can rehearse today, and five more on the backlog just waiting to be learned. In about a week, I had a full set list worth of music to start learning.”

Burk expressed excitement about having Burk join the band.

“I knew this was going to be a game-changer,” Burk said. “I knew he was a technical drummer. I knew that I could throw shit at him, and he’d put it together. I’m pretty stoked, because I know I can push my horizons now. And he comes from a big fucking band. They were going to be the next big thing.”

Perez, who comes from a hip-hop background, said he’s needed to start working harder since the band got back together.

“The second practice, they were talking and were like, ‘It’s in 4/4,’ and to me—I’m the least of the musicians here,” Perez said. “It’s like they’re speaking fucking Japanese, and I don’t know what they are talking about. But they tell me about breakdowns and stuff, and I’m like, ‘OK, cool, now I know what you’re talking about.’ They all push each other and then look at me, and then I push myself, and we start coming up with ideas.

“What I’m dropping is still hip-hop and metal mixed. It’s not traditional rap, and it’s not screaming rap. They push me to adjust myself, and my songwriting is getting better and better every time.”

Drop Mob is planning to pick up where they left off—including making that long-delayed album.

“Now that we’ve got Alex, the plan is to speed that process up ten-fold,” Burk said. “We haven’t all spoken about it, but financially, I’m in a better position right now to where I want to do it right. I want to go somewhere where money isn’t going to be so much of an object and just nail out the songs and kill it. It’s hard when you only have a little bit of money, and you’re doing this and that, and going here and there. It’s like trying to put a puzzle together when you don’t have all the pieces, and money is the final fucking piece in everything. I think it’s important to have a good product.”

The members of Drop Mob said they’re open to even more additions to the band.

“I think it’s important to have some different flavors and dynamics,” Burk said. “I want things to be heavy and melodic. It’s a little hard on the big guy (Perez) over here. I’d love to find a female vocalist. To me, it’s a big deal as to how it looks on the band, because I’ve felt like we’ve always been an underdog band.”

Burk then pointed to the band’s CV Music Award.

“For Christ’s sake, we’re ‘Drop Mop’ over there!” he said. “It’s hilarious, but at the same time, we won that.”

Perez hopes that whoever they get will make Drop Mob sound like something no one has ever heard before.

“We’d like to get someone who can also write and somebody where if we hear them sing, we go, ‘Dude, I know I’ll be able to collaborate,’” Perez said. “That’s the biggest thing: I want to be able to collaborate and do something that doesn’t sound like Linkin Park, given we’re doing our own metal. I don’t call it nu-metal anymore; I call it ‘hip-rock.’”